Web Origami, for making websites where you can understand how they’re made

My interest in this is piqued. I’m really happy to see people doing things to simplify personal standalone website authorship making it expressive and flexible without a bulky content management system or jumping through hoops for some front-end toolchain. I know when I’m developing things I’m often as or more concerned with satisfying multiple use cases or functionality extensibility, but having a nice focused tool polished for one use case is nice. When I was deep in web dev and had my machine set up with a selection of go-to docker setups for different dev needs and the knowledge of how that all needed to be orchestrated was fresh in my mind, deploying most of the SSGs or whatever seemed trivial. Now in the odd event that I have a personal project or whatever that indicates more than just a few static handmade pages, the first thing I do after looking up what todays web world consider to be the “obvious” best tools and practices is see how many people are asking about counterintuitive config issues or other getting-started type problems. As cool as whatever application might look, I know I’ve got about two good hours in me of recall, research and troubleshooting before I just say “fuck it. Guess I didn’t want to do that project anyway.” The point of those tools is to save time and energy — you don’t have to get very far outside “the loop” for it to take more effort than it’s worth to get back in for a lot of them. Simple tools for simple tasks are great when you know you’ll never ever need built-in hooks to wrangle graphql queries and automatically invalidate CDN caches and generate 10 sizes of images optimized for every conceivable device or whatever.

So... it's a static site generator? I've looked through the site, but I'm having trouble putting it in context. Sounds like it takes data and turns it into a static website. Is that right?

Interesting, and I love Static Site Generators (SSGs), but as soon as you introduce branching and logic to the page creation, you've effectively ruled out non-programmers. So I don't know how it will achieve the stated goal of "a language for making websites where you can understand how they're made."

The audience you're left with (programmers) will bristle at the DSL and wonder why they don't just use "___" <-- fill in their favorite SSG.

I love this.

And, I have my own take on it.

My static site generator Svekyll (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli) has an option you can add to the _config.yml: "view_source"

If you do that, it provides a link at the bottom of each post which says "view source to this post" If you click on that, you can see all the files used to generate that post, and then download a zip which is a fully packaged tiny svelte app that builds into that blog page.

For example, this blog post on embeddings has a bunch of svelte components, embeds an embedding model right inside the page and runs it via JavaScript. If you scroll all the way down, you can download the zip file, unzip it and run "npm i && npm run build && cd build && npx http-server -o" and you can see the fully built blog.

https://webiphany.com/2024-04-29-distance-sean-shawn

PRs describing this feature:

https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests... https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests... https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests...

Also: https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2024/11-20-programming-langu...

This site would benefit from a comparison with other static site generators.

I dare say it's not that difficult for a programmer to roll their own SSG with whatever is at hand.

Does it have any clever properties that naive solution wouldn't?

* Like reproducible builds or incremental/cacheable builds?

* Does it require the entire site fits in memory at build time, or can it generate terabyte-sized sites without breaking a sweat?

I'm using Origami on my website over at https://vale.rocks. I recently did a brief writeup about the implementation of my site, including touchings on Origami. I'm really loving it!

https://vale.rocks/posts/the-implementation-of-this-site

This looks great! I love the simplicity of the syntax. I feel like other static site generators can get too crazy with syntax and features, making it hard to learn. I think Origami is really nice in comparison. Also great looking docs.

The metaphor is strained at best, and confusing at worst. It's a very high-concept pitch and so is the technical documentation, but the use case is aimed at people doing something, ultimately, very simple. I'm not sure that friction works at all.

Unnecessary complexity can decrease the shelf life and lifetime of a piece of software.

Best to keep it simple to let any complex needs arrive on their own, instead of prematurely complicating things.

> The Origami language syntax is relatively simple and intended for people who have some experience working with HTML and CSS. Knowledge of JavaScript isn’t required, although if you do know JavaScript you can do a lot with Origami.

So you need to learn HTML and CSS so you can use Origami to... avoid building a site with HTML and CSS?

Thanks for making it open-source!